koiame response

Koiame response

As is clear in most of your criticisms of koiame, I think most of it can be explained by the fact that you view this as a romance and not a character drama, but more on that in a bit.
For the first point, the idea that you don’t understand why Tachibana is in love with Kondou. Well, you pretty much explained it yourself. Tachibana is in love with Kondou for no apparent reason, its quite literally the point. She falls in love with Kondou because she’s at such a point in her life/teenage angst that she has nothing else to do. She’s in a rut, she can’t run, she lost all of her friends from running when she quit, she has nothing other than this shitty part-time job. And I guess you can disagree that this may be a part of human nature if you want, but if you’re a bored horny 17 year old, I don’t think its that much of a stretch to believe that Akira would choose an older man to become the object of her affection.
Not to say that Kondou is straight up unlikeable, and if that’s your point here I guess I would disagree with that too even though I think it is far from being the point of both his character and Tachibana’s character. I’m crossposting a little blurb I thought nicely summed him up, credits to ‘alonesome’, “it's such a believable portrayal of an middle-aged manager; someone who's studious and hardworking but a bit bumbling and really forgetful, the type to read management books and attempt all sorts of silly tactics to get his staff to like him more, polite and conscientious but really socially awkward”.
Moving on to the assertion of “If it’s due to her vulnerability, the show should probably address that, and her character arc should probably focus around her realizing this and re-examining her feelings as she either ages or recovers from her injury and reconciles with her loss”. The show DOES do this to an extent, I don’t think this is the whole point of her arc but I certainly do think it is a facet of it. At its core, Tachibana’s arc is about sort of bouncing back from her injury (and admittedly I do think this is the more boring part of it), but it also absolutely about realizing the context of her love for Kondou and vise versa. These two people relate to each other very specifically at a very distinguishing point in their lives and they DO start to fall in love. If the last 2 episodes of the show didn’t exist, I might be able to agree with you. But the last episode of the show is both characters realizing the context of their love was wrong. They realized they began to love each other because they were weak, rather than naturally falling in love with one another, which is why they decide to part ways at the end and tell each other “wait for me”, because they both clearly do think that there may be a correct context for their love in the future, but that now was not the time because of Akira’s (and Kondou’s) vulnerability (also probably the age gap oWo).
It also seems as though you attribute most of the character growth to Haruka and Chihiro which I couldn’t really disagree with more. Haruka and Chihiro are certainly factors, in fact I would call them outsiders to the main scope of the show. They certainly open the door for Tachibana to come back to running and for Kondou to come back to literature, but to suggest that they’re the ones who help Akira/Kondou walk through that door is just beyond me. I don’t get why you view this as a ‘drama portion of the show’ and a ‘romance portion of the show’. The romance is the vehicle for the character drama and growth. Akira is the reason that Kondou was able to write again, not Chihiro. Kondou is the reason Akira was able to run again, not Haruka. The characters’ gap in age is what enables these characters to come to this realization in the first place.
So to tie it up, I think you’re looking at the show from the weird perspective of “this is the romance part” and “this is the dramatic part” and might not have understood the finale that well or what it meant for the characters and their relationship. I think After the Rain is the best looking show this year but to each its own I suppose. Don’t know what you mean by information dispensation being poorly handled, you’ll have to expand on that.